Methodological Foundations in Bioethics: Towards a More Generative Relationship between Medicine and Religion

Historically, bioethics has been one of the primary areas within which reflection on medicine and religion occurs. But as John Evans describes in *The History and Future of Bioethics*, over time and for a variety of reasons the main field of bioethics largely has become incapable of offering a rich description of the lived reality of both medicine and religion and their intersections. In order to facilitate renewed work on religion and medicine within the field of bioethics, this paper proposes a methodological correction to the field.

In his recent work *The Ethics of Everyday Life*, Christian ethicist Michael Banner argues that modern moral philosophy shows little concern for the actual world of moral action and the people and practices through which it occurs. Whether or not Banner's claim is accurate for the field of moral philosophy in general, it certainly rings true as a description of contemporary work in bioethics - "a bioethics that misunderstands and misconstrues the ethical, rather than explicates it" (22). Banner’s critique of bioethics is echoed by many, including sociologist Renée Fox, anthropologist Arthur Kleinman, and historian Judith Swazey.

In response, this paper proposes that bioethics reconfigure the relationship between anthropology and ethics that it assumes. To do so, it draws from Stanley Hauerwas’s dictum, “You can only act in the world you can see and you can only see what you have learned to say,” revising it slightly to read, “You can only act in the world you can perceive and you can only perceive what you have learned to say.” In other words, theories concerned with moral action must be integrated with phenomenological, ethnographic, and historical investigations into the very fields within which action occurs. By describing the practitioners, practices, and discourses present in the work of healthcare, the conditions of possibility for moral action can be better understood and so nurtured in fitting directions.

Through this methodological shift in bioethics, the theological and moral commitments of religious traditions are not only able to be better integrated with the work of medicine – they in fact are discovered to be already operating within the world of healthcare itself. The paper concludes by considering how approaches to death and care in modern medicine are revealed to be deeply religious. In this way, the methodological correction to bioethics proposed by this paper is shown to bring the fields of medicine and religion into a more constructive relationship.